How to Remove Mountain Bike Chain Rings

Video Transcript

If you need to remove your chain rings, either to replace worn ones or just change the units out for sizes that are more specific to your needs, the first step is removing the cranks for your bike. Bunch of different crank sets--I'm not going to go into that here, you can check out some of the other great videos to get a good idea of what that is. So, after we've removed our cranks, we have our two, three, one chain ring cranks, and there's two different types of fastening methods that are used to secure the chain rings. On your smallest chain ring in your triple ring crank, your chain rings are held by single five millimeter bolts, either four or five of them, directly to what we call the spider, which is what all the other chain rings are mounted to. These are going to be pretty tight. If they were installed in the factory some robot with really strong arms bolted them on. But otherwise you just move them to the left, they come on out--you can see they're pretty short, they usually have some sort of lock tight or other anaerobic thread locker on there, and you undo the bolts and remove them, and it's a fairly simple process. On the other hand, with double chain rings, you can have a lot more issues. This one's seen some heavier use. You can see there's some rust on it and stuff like that. And the way these fasteners work is that it's still a really similar five millimeter chain ring, and then there's a nut on the other side. And you can see this nut, and there's a little bit of dust and dirt and rust in this application. So there's a special tool, it's a chain ring nut holding tool, which is basically two prongs on the outside that go into these reliefs on the tool, and a prong on the inside to keep everything aligned. So what we do here, as I've got this and the nut and I'm trying to work against that to loosen the chain ring up. And it's a real bear sometimes, but I got it loose, and now things are coming apart. So, it's always good to either lubricate or lock tight these fasteners to keep everything working for a long time. It looks like this was a simple dry. You can see that there's some rust here on the threads, so when I go to reassemble these I'm going to be sure to lubricate them. But that's pretty much the gist of it with these things. If it's sticky, you use one of these nut tools to hold the backside, you remove either your four or five chain ring bolts, and then replace them with something else.

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